The victim was a 60-year-old carpenter who was working on a city-owned house on Osage Road, police said. Shot multipl times inside the house, he died Monday night after being flown to a San Francisco Bay Area hosital for surgery. Police were seeking two male assailants.

Cmdr. Vince Maiorana said the incident, coupled with the slaying Sunday of a woman at the Willow Lodge, continued to magnify the impact of Friday's police shooting of wanted parolee and convicted gang member Juan Luis Acuna.

Acuna, 30, also known as Juan Magdaleno Acuna, was shot multiple times after he fired at a member of the Joint Gang Task Force near Ivy and East Market streets. At a news conference Monday, Maiorana said the officer rammed Acuna with his car, but Acuna got back up and appeared to point his handguns again.

Nine officers opened fire, including a Monterey County sheriff's deputy and a California Highway Patrol officer. Acuna died at the scene.

Police Chief Kelly McMillin said eight of his officers — seven who fired at Acuna and the one who knocked him down with his car — were placed on routine administrative leave to allow time for them to deal with the emotional impact of the fatal incident and for an internal investigation to confirm it was justified.

He said the shooting left the department with perilously low staffing levels.

"Weeks like this really bring into sharp relief exactly what happens when you don't have enough people on a day-to-day basis to deal with the big events when they come in," he said.

At Monday's news conference, Deputy Chief Terry Gerhardstein said the immediate loss of the involved officers and investigation of the scene left the city with one patrol car Friday night. It went to a domestic violence call. Sheriff's deputies had to respond to a subsequent domestic call involving a knife. Many calls went unanswered, he said.

"For that, we apologize to the citizens of Salinas, but we simply had no choice," he said. "That night ... shut down the Salinas Police Department. And there will be more of those nights."

The department was further stretched with the discovery Sunday morning of a woman shot at the Willow Lodge, the city's ninth homicide of the year, excluding Acuna, and the fifth this month. Gerhardstein said his officers have worked 400 hours of overtime since Friday's shooting.

The crime-scene investigator alone worked 20 hours of overtime on the officer-involved shooting only to be called in to work an additional 10 hours of overtime for the Willow Lodge homicide. The victim of that shooting, a woman in her 40s, has not been identified by police.

Without releasing more detail, McMillin said the fact that 10 officers responded within seconds to the threat posed by Acuna shows the department has the investigative intelligence to monitor the city's most violent gang members. However, without more officers, he said, it does not have sufficient manpower to address those further down in the pecking order, or to prevent the city's children from following in their path.

"I hope the community will look past the tragedy, the taking of a human life, and understand that good police work put those officers in the position to intervene with that guy," he said. "We have the knowledge and talent base to find those very violent people and deal with them. We just don't have enough."

McMillin said he could make a case for the department needing 280 officers and commensurate staff. He's authorized for 148.

Police did not explain why the Joint Gang Task Force had Acuna under surveillance Friday, except to say he was a wanted gang member who had absconded from parole, they had information linking him to recent shootings and were told he was in the area and may be armed.

Acuna had a criminal record dating back to 1999, including convictions for auto theft, felon in possession of a firearm and evading police.

On Friday, the gang task force saw him in the area of Kern and East Market streets. When they approached, he ran, and officers saw he was holding a handgun, Maiorana said.

Acuna was ordered to stop and drop the weapon but he continued to flee, pulling a second semi-automatic handgun from his clothing, the commander said. He ran into a parking lot where he turned and fired at the pursuing officer.

The officer struck Acuna with his patrol car, knocking him to the ground. Acuna got up and appeared to point his weapons again, Maiorana said, at which point all of the officers opened fire except for the first officer and a parole agent who was present but uninvolved.

The entire incident, he added, happened in a matter of seconds.

Maiorana confirmed there were others taken into custody near the scene that night, but refused to release details of their arrests. He said it is too early to determine if any of the recent shootings, including Sunday's at the Willow Lodge, are related.

In that shooting, police responded to the motel shortly before 8a.m. on reports of a gunshot, explosion and fire. They found the victim had been shot, though it was unclear if she was killed by gunfire or the explosion.

A small fire that had been set in the room was quickly extinguished.

Police ask anyone with information about any of the recent shootings to call the investigations unit at 758-7226 or the watch commander at 758-7250. Information can be left anonymously at 775-4222 or 800-78-CRIME.